With the advance of information technologies, the Internet industry becomes more widespread day by day. A great number of host computers are connected to the Internet every day to play a decisive role in making the whole world into one global village.
The World Wide Web also makes a great contribution to the integration of the whole world into one global village in that it helps ordinary persons to easily access and use the Internet through personal computers and multimedia functions.
The development of the World Wide Web has rapidly switched over to commercial use. Electronic commerce is a representative example of using the Internet commercially.
Recently, electronic commerce has rapidly spread to financial institutions, such as banks, securities companies and others. Provided over the Internet are a variety of services, for example, the provision of map data (or geographical data) from a geographical information system, the provision of various electronic advertisements (banner advertisements) in a moving image form or still image form, an Internet phone service, an Internet TV service, an Internet facsimile service, etc. These services make a great contribution to the popularization of the Internet and an increase in Internet using population.
On the other hand, conventional automatic sticker vending machines have a disadvantage in that they can output nothing but photographs of users. One such conventional automatic sticker vending machine comprises a digital camera for picking up an image in front thereof, an image processor for processing the image picked up by the digital camera, and an output device for outputting the image processed by the image processor to the surface of a sticker in a color printing manner. A user takes his/her own image (photograph) by the digital camera installed in the sticker vending machine and outputs the taken image in the form of a sticker, or synthesizes it with a previously edited image and outputs the synthesized result in the form of a sticker.
That is, the above-mentioned conventional automatic sticker vending machine is desirable in that it can edit sticker contents using some edit data stored in its internal memory, but has a disadvantage in that it cannot update the edit data with newest data because it has no separate communication means.
As a result, the above conventional sticker vending machine cannot update the existing sticker data with up-to-date data or newest ones of images (photographs) and information of stars varying widely in their popularity at proper times, so it cannot meet users' expectations, resulting in a reduction in utilization.